96 Quotes by Kevin Barry

One might trouble one's dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth.

Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.

It was Dominick Gleeson, aka Big Dom, editor of the city's only newspaper, the Bohane Vindicator. Of course, it was in no small part thanks to Logan Hartnett that the Vindicator remained the city's only newspaper. Its masthead solgan: 'Truth or Vengeance', as inked above a motif of two quarrelling ravens.

A troubled silence descends—the old times are shifting again; they are rearranging like fault lines. The past will not relent.

The Past is uncertain, mobile. It shifts and rearranges back there yet.

We are all terrified, John. There is no mystery to it. If you weren't terrified, there would be something wrong with you...I'll tell you what matters. How you hold yourself is what fucken matters.

Out here, it was as if the world had backed off from them for a spell. They believed in fatedness and and meant-to-be's. They believed in the dark star that was theirs to steer by.

Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses.

The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming.